Recursion
by Stradivari
Summary: The most beautiful things are not the ones that come once, but ones that return and yet how they return is another matter. [dark]


R E C U R S I O N

-Stradivari-

**:i:**

"_And yet, in all his new found sentience, he could not have known that,_

_as a man looks into the mirror of his dreams, _

_something in that mirror is always looking back."_

_**-** _Pullman.

**:i:**

They found him.

Found him like one find's the wind, still for a moment on frost chilled earth, a light smoke to the eye, still for a moment as she stands there, the dark expensive cloth at her feet in side-ways-eight folds like the dark expensive glint in the half closed eyes, still for a moment as the wind unfurls herself, tastes the air as one taste wine-

She searches.

Yet there is no sign of amber at his lips; bloodless and almost as white as the skin framed in black errands upon a high brow, no sign of amber in eyes still and dark and glinting. Still for a moment, as the wind sighs itself away.

He saw.

Remembering, as one remembers moonlit nights, moonlit nights remembered, created, the scent of allure planted there as the sphere lights up the sky, a face somewhere in the depths of a lake, in the depths of a mind that does not know what moon it remembers, that same brilliant, genius, attractive mind that knows not the kisses it stole, knows not those moonlit nights where watched from the window panes, watching; against all good will and clichés bind. Over and over and over.

Just out of reach, where moonlit nights end, fade, draw back as curtains draw back onto a starless night. As if he was already a memory.

Uncovered.

Eyes and fingers that linger upon his face, a thin lamb's neck, knows the moments when those eyes can see no burns that held it there, no blemish. No darkened line, like the petals of a white narcissus- white and tearstained as she crushes them within her hands.

They did not bleed; amber nor red. And yet she clutches them still, folding those pianist fingers in and around her own, tying knots again, again; as if he had died also. Could hear the crowds? _Encore! Encore!_

He played-

She watches her, taking in the figure with her curtain of curls, moonlit nights left behind in the flurry of autumn leaves, trailing in the wake of a gown trimmed in white and gold. She watches her from open windows and open doors as she screams the death no one else can hear, tears no one but her watcher and herself could see. They came, however, unbidden like the ghosts that slept there, resplendent in masks and amber rings. She could see one dead already, his steel eyes bearing so. Watching, from empty windows and empty doors. And wondered briefly, if it were omens, were they not those echoes that had no dresses of white and gold but rather naked, unbidden like the ghosts that slept there; grey in their absence of masks and amber rings?

And even as this brief thought blossomed, it was gone again as all doubt goes, fleeting like the heels of silver shoes seen only around the corner of a spiraling staircase she ran, as she does there are rustlings in the stone flashing past; blood on her fingertips- ascending or descending, however, one does not always know. Fleeting as those memories of moonlit nights which were no more than reflections in the water.

She screams.

Then we are silent.

He listened.

Tears like cherry blossoms, staining the remnants of winter snow, yet gone when the caress of summer leaves clothed its slender frame. And the sky watches on, silently, dutifully, unchanging and unmoved. Not even in that still, windless moment, when the music ceases as the clarinet ceases to flower in its wonderful hue of polished black, polished words dripping from a polished mind-

Hers still bore the scratches cut into them-

Listen!-as the violins cease with it, slowly, gradually, like Tchaikovsky's ballet bows. And then that moment passed also and the rest played on, flutes crying with her for a few bars; then inevitably modulating into a ceaseless, deathless major key.

Abandoned.

Ceaseless, as she screams, silently for the clarinet no longer sang and the strings lie broken on the round, snapped twice at the neck. Then she was placed back into her case, a price tag strung across her eyes.

And ceaselessly, the others prise her away.

His hands fall; unclutched and unplayed. And this she sees, watching from a closed window high above, lost in the last vestiges of red in the faltering azure sky. A fantasy she does not understand. A fantasy she wished she could dream like the side-ways-eight folds of cloth, now covered in white.

She screams.

Over and over…

But today, he does not hear.

How long she stood there, she didn't know.

There were no clocks around her in the night, no insistent tick that caged time so that the hour that should have remained lost in the ether resurfaced like the mast of a sunken ship. And yet, even without those hands- those beautiful, beautiful hands- the ship broke the water.

She watched the ripples there for a second, reaching to slow time, to return to the forming of those faultless circles. And her fingers brushed only shadows, which parted like the souls lost in a well, parted to let her pass. As if a respect shown in echo of the respect she could never hear.

She paused, and then returned to waiting.

He came; came away from that girl, asleep, three floors above their heads. Came, rather like how she had come, his shirt hanging about his shoulders in a shroud mottled with light from a reflection somewhere unseen, steps soft on polished and carpeted floors alike. And with each step, her heart seemed to quicken, a cold chain linked gold upon her breast.

There was no wind in the corridor. And yet, as he passed, wind unfurled again like falling petals in his wake, a path he had retraced for the last few months, every night, in every memory of moonlit nights and nights of moonless lights; like a dreamer dancing with the lame ghosts who slept there.

She smiles at this- wishing the other could see so.

He paused; a delicate movement, the imitation of a sigh escaping one's lips; like the unfolding wings of a butterfly. He lifted a hand; so pale it was like the webs of spider silk spun in that same night.

The fingers interlocked for a single, breathless moment.

The butterfly struggled, wings still wet from its birth, a faint smudge of red and yellow; the colour of sunshine smeared into the aria, something far more sacred than it was. Tears of a virgin.

His eyes lingered on it, and she found herself unable to look away, unable to draw back, to resist the blatant, yet subtle trap he was pulling.

Without warning, he looked up, his curiously haunting gaze of hazel and indigo lit a fire within the depths of her own mind where, somewhere in the morning room, he had opened a window. She drew back then, hands hot with searing heat. His eyes spoke, and the ghosts shifted uneasily around them with each unspoken word, muttering doubts she tried to dismiss. Most of all, the metal that hung against the folds of her dressing gown, so like a ring, yet so unlike wedded bliss. She pressed herself against the wall, a dull beating around the center region of her ribcage. For a full minute, they were both still, him, surveying her unseeingly across their dance floor.

An untold story- myth in a parallel universe.

_Perhaps in this one too,_ she thought.

Slowly, he lowered his hand. The shirtsleeve fell to cover his fingertips.

But not before she saw, over and, the spirals of red and yellow fall-

as he crushed the butterfly in his fist.

He came, as he always did, through an arch, whose door he opened with a mere gesture; a dreamer, omnipotent in his own dream; and she, only a character he had programmed there, caught up in the whirl of the wind, in the autumn in that world, held within the hands of that dreamer.

Lights flared slowly to life, a deep amber glow that seemed to lap, as waves do lap at the fringes of the shore, then draw back as she drew back, sequined shoes almost within that light- then the shadows, like grains of golden sand, trickled. It trickled free over the carpet; both unable to find the hourglass from which they were stolen.

As if Apollo had drawn his sun back onto himself, leaving her in darkness.

Yet she knew this could not be.

She wondered again, as she always did, those doubts coming as surely as he came. The reason that she halted every night there, halted in her watching of this god, halted there, unsure of hate or love.

And she retreats.

Yet, she would come back again, like a bird that comes flying back from over the seas, as surely as he did, though what doubts plagued him, she could only guess. As the world guessed. As the Romans guessed, the Mings…

…so that the moonlit nights that were her memories to hold dear were perhaps fancies in the dark as well?

It killed her to know; as Diana knew; yet killed her not to know- killed in that grey sense that was the abyss that stretched before her, knowing she was not to be killed, yet knowing the choices of what lay at the end of that abyss; looking up at the small white line that was the bridge she could have taken…

Memory killed doubts.

…tonight, like so many other amber filled nights.

It was a handsome room, at the center of which stood a piano. The door he left slightly ajar, and a shaft of light stole silently across the carpet in the corridor beyond; a slice of something sweet in the unwavering night air. The lights in the glass cases which stood at the end of the room were dark. Even so, the chandelier splayed delicately across the glass and polished wood, the light brown of a Stradivarius shone dimly in the face, its scent trapped, swirling in the ebbs of water of an atonal sea.

He struck a match; its anger flitting across those sharp features; the sound of its burning louder than a symphony. It gave sharp contrast to his skin; draining the little colour that was in his face. And yet his eyes, sweeping across the violin, paused here and there; kept in time to its curves by an unheard metronome.

He lit the candles on the candelabra one by one; counting at the edge of his mind with the air of unimportance and casual elegance that only a mind, unthinking, could create.

Perhaps the should of these restless hours, these restless nights were here for him to find?

And yet, when he did find this, what was to keep him in these restless hours, to keep these minutes ticking away, if not to find…then leave?

He brush a hand across the orange flames, as if the command to close her eyes. He would never quite master that desire. It was like lust. It glowed in the water, the phantom butterflies that fly above the surfaces with equally beautiful, phantom answers. And yet that lure!- was this the wish that held him there now, to stare with that hunger he had seen before, all these nights into unlit fire, on another face?

He curled his fingers around the cold gilt handle of the candelabra, lifting it from the velvet that clothed the grand, its folds kissing the floor. The shadows shifted with him, a strange, dancing duet. The pedals seemed to creak, as if the dance was painful to behold.

He walked with the candles to the opposite end of the small room, the darker shades of colour parting like fish at his feet. Every night, over and over; a prophet of the Messiah he prophesized. Or, to his triumph, the God sent there to die. Or merely to sleep.

And when he opened his eyes once more-

It was a painting of a boy in his late teems, a pale, slender face like his watcher- yet with two blue eyes.

Two seas and two flames, whereas now there was only one.

They were lit now, with the candle light or intelligence he could not tell, but also watching, his expression unreadable, framed in heavy gold like the frame of a mirror from a day long gone. He appraised the world with dark, devious eyes; youthful, yet of a dead man held captive in time.

A self portrait.

He set the flickering candelabra down on the table next to the book case, throwing both his face and the boy's into shadow. Outside the window, something cried to be let in; it took the form of an owl, cried once more and dissolved in the moonlight.

For a long moment, his fantasy was complete, face angled so he could be ignorant of the ceaseless tick of a large ornamental clock and the splashes of water which the 'something' cried; an aria echoing in the line between air and water; abandoned thoughts falling on marble into marble depths. It was an almost inaudible sound, like laughter of some little girl in the grounds on a pleasant summer's afternoon. Or a the same little girl, who cried over and over in those same grounds on that same, pleasant afternoon.

He could no longer distinguish the difference; and in perfection such as those, in the moments where The Thing That Cried as safely locked outside in the night; he did not care.

And it was this careless quality he seeked.

The boy sighed.

The young man, turned at the sound, a slight movement, fingertips absently tapping a rhythm upon the piano top. At once, music played. It was as if he had anticipated the sound- waited for the breath to come first; first breath or last and what of the things that danced after the cue-

The boy sighed again. Then spoke, his voice like a diminished chord played amidst a broken fifth. It slid, like a cat, languidly across the parquetry and settled on the dark piano stool, fixing the man with unblinking, yellow eyes.

_-- ­­Shadows of Schumann, are we?_

Lights flickered in the depths of his haunting eyes; as if annoyance had forced its way to his features. Then it was gone.

The feline smiled like a Cheshire cat, its eyes still fixed upon the man's neck. A shiver ran through he ghosts in the room and the amber faltered from the candelabra.

The young man replied, his voice as bland as the cloth draped over the clarinet in the corner.

"Shadows? I think not. My own."

The boy chuckled; the ghosts shivering again. An owl cried; then fell silent. The cat stretched, and he was forcibly reminded of the devil, basking in the warmth of the flames of hell, rings overlapping each other like patterns of side-ways-eights. He quickly shook the last thought aside.

_Not yet._

When the boy spoke again, his voice held the lilting quality like the temptation hidden in deep, amber wine.

_--Of course, of course. Mozart, then._

His eyes laughed tauntingly across the room, though his face remained quite somber. As if a mask, floating in a sea of masks, dancing in a masquerade that ended only when the music stopped- only when the conductor waves and-

Grinning faces flashed past him in their twirling dances, hidden like the smiles at funerals; serious and bland yet so comical in their lie. And a sudden appearance of a looming clown made him cry out in childish, naïve fear heard not so long ago. His skin felt hot beneath the fabric of his shirt, yet he was calm. He was always calm.

That thought too, masqueraded in his head.

Another cry.

Only then, did he realize it was the Thing Outside The Window. The curtains fluttered gently, as he replied,

"Oh no. Not Mozart."

He wondered if it was trying to come inside, and fought an irresistible urge to check the window ledge. Rather like the child who is afraid of the dark and what it may contain, but is also too afraid to discover what the dark holds.

The boy laughed again, and this time, the butterflies that were inscribed upon his frame took flight, gold leaf wings carrying them in a fleeing attempt to escape. One flew into the curtains and became lost in the folds of satin. He spoke;

_--Oh really? And why is that? Surely you have noticed…all our evenings together, if not Schumann…_

His voice trailed off tantalizingly, like the scent of power, heavy as honeysuckle in the air. The cat smiled again, eyes now following the progress of the butterflies dancing in the amber glow of the chandelier. Autumn butterflies. He frowned, as the piano began to sing in orchestral strands. He had not noticed the change.

"I do not intend to die in a mortal grave."

The boy's insistent laughter echoed sharply against the piano. A butterfly fell from the air; heart plucked from a dying soul. It fell like a leaf and rippled the water's surface, so like the mirror that ripples at your touch- once, twice- then was still. And when you look back into that mirror…

_--Listen to yourself! To be immortal? My dear friend, you are becoming a sentimental fool. To die in a cheap grave, more like._

He brushed the comment away, like that stray leaf on a jacket sleeve. And the leaf began its spiraling (always spiraling) descent once more. He looked at him steadily, and the boy gazed just as steadily back through his picture. The man gave his first smile, a smirk, full of sarcasm and confidence.

"Whereas you will be immortal, correct?"

The youthful features were contorted in a sudden, unsightly sneer.

_--You will not become a god if you strike yourself down. Nor if you decide to suddenly deplete yourself of half a dozen IQ points._

"The only one guilty of idiocy is you.

_--Oh yes? And surely that is exactly the thing you have been looking for…?_

He face was drawn in the dark, coffee gold shadows, yet panic was there, deep within the windows of those bottomless wells. A flicker, like the flicker of light when one dances past, a flicker, that could be simply the light, hesitating and no dancer at all that dances past. Outside, something cried again, and this time, it did not cease like the last. They listened for a moment to the indefinable voice, as one listens when pausing upon the sound of jazz issuing from a pianist somewhere in a room lit with a glow that reflects off the deep mist of wine…

He changed the subject.

"This is by no means an intelligent conversation, either."

The boy angled his head sideways, attention fixed upon the other's expression, which remained causally blank. In his eyes, the glitter was back, a hungry look, shallow so it was just visible within that same, echoing well. A stone drops- by whom, they did not notice- yet they waited all the same. Waited, like she did. And at last, he spoke;

_--No. It is already far from that, isn't it?_

"Yes." He replied without hesitation, "It is."

_--Topics are bound to get covered. _The other continued, rather conversationally. How all wars started. _We're nearly there, though._

He glanced up, just in time to see the sleek, black cat blink. Once, twice. He noticed the tip of a paper thin wing protruding from its purring mouth. It grinned at him, and then slid from the stool to the ground, with grace, and out of sight. The shadows parted to let him pass, and then closed behind him like the red sea. He wondered, distractedly, of whom these ebbing waters drowned. And who was to drown.

He returned his gaze reluctantly to the painting. For some strange, unexplainable reason, his heart began to race.

"Nearly there? And your definition of that is…"

The boy grinned like his counter part, and for one moment, he was the cat, ears twitching wit the gaze of those large, yellow eyes. Then his face was pale skin again.

_--My definition is your definition. _

He winked- and the action was done in such an uncharacteristic fashion that the fantasy was for a moment, out of place. Then the memories of moonlit nights returned in a torrent, overwhelming, overpowering in its sweet scent, sweet reminders of sweet mornings and the warmth of a china cup in his hands. The ghosts gave a collective sigh of relief.

A long minute passed.

Beyond the windows, the fountain continued to sing and the Thing continued to cry.

He strained his senses, as a swimmer strains to see in deep turquoise wells. And he sees nothing but stone, knowing not that the stone sees much more. If only he could remember what the Thing was crying- to hear properly what it sang, relentlessly, unforgiving-

But it too, was lost in moonlit nights.

With a wrench that left his soul frozen, he answered.

"You are avoiding the question. With less elegance than you usually maneuver, if I may say so."

_--Stating the obvious. Not good for your health. If I may say so._

"Answer me."

_--Oh, but it's my turn. My turn._

He produced a sheaf of music with a flourish.

_--Not even Debussy and his Impressionists can rob me of that. _Rubato_ goes both ways, you know. _

"Now look who is stating the obvious."

_--Yes. But you're falling already. Whereas, I am still where I started. _

The young man raised a thin, slanting eyebrow, perhaps a fraction.

"Better late than never."

The notes from the piano was reaching forte, and distantly, he could hear the screaming of a violin somewhere…in the wings, perhaps, underneath which the Thing cried thoughts too lost to belong in any mind. The boy seemed to read his for that single moment, and smirked, hands, gesticulating in an odd, unreal way, reprimanding him mockingly.

_--letters unsent, Artemis. Letters unsent._

He straightened his tie.

He looked him up and down, as if seeing him properly for the first time. Yet the mist around had not disappeared, merely shifted at each word they spoke, each murmur of the ghosts who slept there. He leaned towards the man who, at the moment took a step forwards. Their eyes were locked in fine webs of silver chords, each of them pulling their own cadence and pitch.

The spider stretched a lazy leg.

The amber light around them shimmered as if viewed in an intense heat. The youth's insane smirk widened.

_--Don't pretend it's Fate, Destiny or even God. It's not._

The butterflies waltzed, waltzed a quartet in and around the candles, throwing golden shadows in dark, mahogany souls. And the music played on. They knew the cat could not reach them there, safe in youthful innocence.

His heart seemed to be caught within its tempo, ever changing, the painful beats of _Clair de lune_ forcing itself through the curtain swathed glass.

"I am not so foolish as to think so highly of myself."

In the corner of the room, the clarinet fell, without warning, from its stand. The anticipated clatter did not come as soon as it fell, but afterwards, like a song that was sung without the lyrics for which it was written. Words in a pause. A bar of total silence.

They fell in a blur of polished black and silver; breaking, as a bell breaks, as a mind breaks, as it broke upon the floor.

The next words spoken shook him from a mild shroud of clustering thoughts; as if the mind was gathering itself together, calling to its spilled shards upon the parquetry.

The falling of the clarinet seemed as fragmented as it was; as if the laughter that was still reverberating against the glass had snapped it silently in two, the silent living in a hell, a silent living hell, silent, hell, silent, hell that snapped the silence of the instrument that made no sound, still dressed as it was in its cloth, trimmed with shadows of the concertos it played yesterday.

Then- just as La Traviata- the music resumed, though this time, it was without the clarinets, though with humor, unspoken and unshared by the ghosts who slept there.

The boy flicked dust from his shirt, pale, tapered fingers snatching at the butterflies which made a darting attempt to perch on its frame once more. The gold blinked as the yellow eyes had done, as the dark blinks on silver strings on a stage with wine red curtains and black rope tassels which held them, the audience turned away from the violinist who also blinks. Then she was gone.

A packet lay, discarded from long ago.

_--Then what are we doing, discussing names?_

For some reason, he suddenly wised for a crystal glass; placed conveniently, perhaps, on the low table beside the wall. Something, anything for him to distract himself from the uncanny gaze of the boy now staring avidly at him, as if, through his brilliantly blue eyes, he could eat out the other's soul.

He remained silent in the vain hope that the other will follow suite.

The water in the well began to calm again, even as the stone touched its unused, sandy bottom. The windows misted over like summer rain, misted, as if two lovers had kissed there, or she had watched from this very window also, watching those lovers kiss. And yet, like summer rain, it drained the well with its fear for summer sun. The breeze seemed to carry that scent, and the thing began to cry.

Over and over and over and-

The boy interrupted.

_--Do you want to know what she said?_

There was the unmistakable hue of glee in his voice now, hidden only by the pale, pale sheaves of music which fluttered again at his words as he dropped them with a lazy hand, and they disappeared to the edge of the frame. Glee, which he had never felt before. It was not even happiness.

It was the sour echo of happiness.

When he replied, his throat was oddly dry.

"Enlighten me."

The boy steepled his fingers, face glowing with morbid wishes. Mockery dripped like the ticking of the clock- only louder and more defined.

_--Like Artemis. Like _Artemis_. That was what she said._

He stared, transfixed at a point where the butterflies had been. There was a smear of gold across the boy's mouth and hands, like the dust that fell from the stars for him, stars that shone for him, a star that died for him, died and returned, died and came back again. Like that dust. Only he knew they would not die for him this time.

Horror and disgust rose within his naked soul like bile, cold and sharp as the pressed sleeves that could be seen at the end of his jacket sleeves, dark against white, like a fallen halo, still holy enough to shine, yet not pure enough to fly. That horror drove straying thoughts from his mind, like the way she plucks straying strands from the hem of the white dress she always wore in summer days-

The boy smiled wider still, teeth as white as the young man's pallor. And he could see a dead butterfly there.

"That is…that is barbaric."

The boy ignored him.

_--Like Artemis, she said. Funny how names can mean so many things. _

He did not seem to have heard him. Deaf, like the cries that took him there. Taken, like the deaf cries that there stood there ground. Even in the darkness, the ghosts shirred. Yet, trapped as he was in the room filled with orchestral instruments, anger was there too, like anger poured into a jar, the glass clear and unseeing like the letters he poured out to sea.

They too, fell to the bottom of that well, along with the stone, and the fallen maple leaf.

"I won't let you. I forbid-"

_--Like Artemis. Not Mozart, nor Schumann, nor God. But Artemis. What can she want with the Goddess of hunt?_

The boy licked his lips once more, tongue flicking out, darting like a snake's. Even so, he was just as suave as that sake, dancing before his charmer, uncharmed and unchanged.

He felt a sudden rush of repulsion.

"And why is this?"

The youth merely pointed at the other's hands, a gesture like the former one, the one that opened and closed the door, though not completely. Perhaps wishing, or another detail in his schemes, a sliver of light to tempt them, a way through for the rest to follow in his steps. Dark steps. A spiraling staircase and a picture of a boy upon the wall.

Unwillingly, he lifted his own hands.

Gold flecked his fingertips.

Gold.

Just like the gold that flecked the painting's mouth.

Gold.

Aurum Potestas Est.

The boy was close against the window now, hands pressed against the bonds of his heavy frame.

_--The question here is very simple. What do you want? Not what she wants. The Goddess can decide._

His face was still impassive. It was an obligation. Yet his face was dark and rippled with fallen leaves from the nearby cherry tree someone had planted there, over the opening of the well. She had been meaning to close that opening. Yet never seemed to be able to pass that cherry tree, the blossoms swirling in the wind to form shapes she never wanted to see. The ashes soon turned grey.

When he did not speak, the boy spoke for him.

_--Who is the barbarian now? And just out of curiosity…_

To him, it seemed that the boy's features were undergoing a grotesque change, altering before his very eyes…or simply the hunger was intensifying, stepping those very ash grey rungs as they spoke, slowly, one by one, but just as surely as he came tonight.

His voice continued to crack against the piano and the strings vibrated as if someone had struck a key.

_--…what is your definition?_

The gown of the wind played around them, the butterflies showering them in dust of pale amber tears shed by pale amber eyes. When it ceased, their wings were as bone white as their faces, as if the colour had been washed away by sunlight dancing against the closed window. Fairy tales and stories untold.

They danced too.

The cellos bowed a deep tremolo.

His voice, when he spoke, was just as soft. Just as broken. And like the tremolo, just as invisible in its breaking.

"What do you want?"

His face was very close to his now. He could almost reach up and touch his face.

_--You and I both want the same thing. Correct?_

He could feel the lure; the second repeat, like the beginning of the second concerto. It was more than a temptation, now, more than a hint, more than Satan's promises of red, burning heavens.

It was an answer.

It echoed around the room;

_Want, want, want, want, want, want, want…_

As if in cruel imitation of childish desire,

Yet now he thought of it, perhaps it had been that all along; night after night. And in the day, he never ventured into these bars alone, and those days- those long, beautiful moonlit days- he never quite finished the phrases, those lost legato lines, walked, yet never quite reaching the end of that pebbled path. Never found out if it was a _dal signo_ or the two dots of recursion that sounded such finality. Such a solid, unwavering answer that was a prerogative taken away from him and him alone.

A composer's prerogative.

Yet the composition had slipped away from him, just as those days turned to nights before the pen caught them in a single black drop of ink.

Like the Impromptu he had promised to write, yet never written, that so often escapes the memory of those white pages, as if he does not want the notes to fall…whether to keep them as saints, forgotten and only remembered in those brief moments of creation, those days that seemed to hold those golden afternoons in a bottle…

…or he simply does not want to care.

"Let them hear." He said, "Let them listen. Then they will forget."

His face was lit with such ecstasy that it leeched the colour from the canvas around him; the butterflies' wings the only sound of white amongst the black. Yet, even as he discovered this, he wondered-

What sound was the black? Were they birds instead, birds that unfold wings and kill the butterflies as the music kills him? What butterflies were they?

Did birds eat butterflies?

Could dreams be killed by fantasy?

_--And yet she said, "Like Artemis." _

_Will she, too, forget?_

The five staves lay blank before them. The figure standing stepped, unconsciously, closer towards the paints, close enough to smell its strangely acrid scent. Like tea, wrought in the flames of scarlet and blue. Hazel and indigo; their smell poisonous, yet attractive like the tall wilting flowers in a vase in the backdrop, like the mind which painted them.

"She does not know."

_--Will_ you

A wry smile brushed, as the rush of gold faded like the summer rainbow, once dreamed, even once _wished_ for…

He hesitated.

The eyes of the boy followed the gaze of his watcher, like a bird watches, like the wolf watches the moon.

_Mesmerised._

_--Shadows of Schumann are we?_

The ghosts were as still as Giselle, poised as the shattered pieces of the clarinet. Echoing want. Night after night.

They appraised each other once more, maple leaves shining in the water, brilliant hate drowned in elegance, in intelligence, hate in golden frames and golden wine, drowned in the music that cries, over and over…

Cries of that hate.

Hate of the Thing that cries.

The butterflies drowned in that amber.

And even afterwards, he stirs with a silver spoon, impassive; the wine did not taste any different.

"Shadows of no one…"

Pale hands rose. Rose like the pianist preparing his final piece, rose like the sinner, condemned yet pleading against his condemnation- where was his dignity?- the fires on the alter that lights the candle of soul for the God he was to seek mercy.

They rose, like Christ did.

One to the painting, the other to the folds of her dress, between her fingers, as dead as the clarinet outside the pool of light from within. It felt cold and heavy against her palm. Sleek, like the words he never said. Like the tales she used to tell.

She watched.

His voice. And a laughter, young and full of embers.

_Ardent fires burned inside her breast. And yet the coldness of metal was overwhelming in its perfection._

She closed her eyes.

Cowardice.

_Oh, cowardice!_

"…You are not I."

**:i:**

They found him.

Found him like one find's the wind, still for a moment on frost chilled earth, a light smoke to the eye, still for a moment as she stands there, the dark expensive cloth at her feet in side-ways-eight folds like the dark expensive glint in the half closed eyes, still for a moment as the wind unfurls herself, tastes the air as one taste wine-

They found him there, lying amidst the shards of a broken mirror, the glass reflecting, as if in a dream, the blank painting which hung behind the piano. And the shards blinked at the ghosts who stood there now, still showing their faces, still a hint of those eyes, sharp as the words unsaid beneath the words untold of yester-night.

_The reason why he never finished it was never discovered; though the first two movements were sketched out in full._

She played the pause.

Then walked out the door.

**:i:**

**Author's Note: Artemis, Artemis in childhood, Thing That Cries, Butterflies and 'She' s. This feels…out of place; wrote it in one breath when I was supposed to be studying for French. Excuse typos and all that. Overly flowery/clichéd. Don't like it. **

**CC appreciated as always. **


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